China Emphasizes Laws As Google Defies Censorship 320
Lomegor writes "Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said on Thursday that all companies are welcome to operate in China but that they must do so under local laws. Although not explicitly, this is in some way a response to Google's threat to leave the country. China also stated that they have strict cyber laws and that they forbid any kind of 'hacking attack'; when asked if those laws apply to the government as well it was quickly avoided. 'It is still hard to say whether Google will quit China or not. Nobody knows,' the official in the State Council Information Office was quoted as saying." I sure would love to be a fly on the wall of these discussions. We certainly live in interesting times.
China's Capability to Conduct Cyber Warfare (Score:5, Informative)
Reading the link below, you will realise that china state hackers
1) have dedicated datacenters for them
2) Work around the clock in 3 shifts during each 24 hours
3) Have specialised teams for things like a) Break in b) Data stealing c) Footprinting
Capability of the People’s Republic of China to Conduct Cyber Warfare and Computer Network Exploitation [uscc.gov]
Re:Two predictions (Score:5, Informative)
Ok Beijinger here. Used to actually work in the Google office in Zhongguancun...
Prediction #1 - Not yet. Which is interesting (youre probably right in that China wont capitulate and it is coming). I think it honestly might be a grace period for everyone to move their accounts. When I woke up today I had the same feeling when an email was bouncing back - and all of a sudden realized that ALL my accounts are gmail. Time to set up some forwards pronto.
Prediction #2 - Exactly right. Yahoo and Microsoft (and ESPECIALLY Baidu of course) wont say a goddamn thing and will be happy with the gain in marketshare. Baidu (the leader in the Chinese market) stock went up over 20% today on the news.
Ahh China. Interesting times.
RE: Fly on the wall (Score:5, Informative)
The original post thinks it would interesting to be the fly on the wall to the "discussions"
I lived over there for 5 years. I don't think it would be quite so interesting unless you haven't been following Chinese politics and all for the past 15 (or 65) years. There will likely be two camps in the Gov't. One that sees the problems of letting a company like Google be forced out of China (call them the Capitalists) and the group that has been trying to make this sort of thing happen ever since the first let foreign companies in in the first place (the Nationalist Communists if you will).
The thing of it is, the Capitalists sympathize with the Nationalists. They just don't want it to be so overt and obvious.
You just have to understand they don't see what they're doing as wrong in any way. Protecting their regime is #1. It has been for thousands of years for whoever is in power there. Currently you can describe it as Nationalism. Go back and read about the lead up to WWI and you'll get a sense of the mind set of many of the people in China, if not the majority. War (with Taiwan) would be glorious, an Empire is a right of China's and to some Everything (worldwide) is part of China and maps should show that.
Re:Two predictions (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe those users have no market value? Why bother target an ad at someone who doesn't have the money to buy your stuff?
Re:Two predictions (Score:2, Informative)
Whose stuff? They make most of it, so technically it's their stuff. We don't have the money to buy it, that's why we have to borrow it from them.
Re:Local laws? What about their constitution? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Two predictions (Score:5, Informative)
A lot of Robotics equipment, Chemical Vapor Deposition machinery, and Semiconductor fabrication machines, CNC Machinery, and other related heavy machinery are still produced in the West(Or in Japan)... Hard to believe for the average /.'er but it's true.
Bad investment (Score:1, Informative)
China does not allow non-Chinese companies to make a profit in china. Before your can your products will be cloned by government backed companies, your website blocked, your travel inhibited, your employees hired away or detained. If you somehow manage to turn a profit your assets will be seized.
For google, doing business in china is a cost without a reasonable prospect of future benefit.
Re:Looks like email and the desktop were not enoug (Score:5, Informative)
It seems that google has moved firmly into politics.
Hardly. This is about Google getting annoyed with China flouting their own laws.
As a server admin I routinely see hacking attempts on our servers emanating from within China. Any attempt to follow this up with the owner of the netblock where the attacks originate from is usually just met with a bounceback from the abuse address or silence.
This has been the case for years as China have no interest in a clampdown on their own citizens hacking. I have long suspected that this was because they were actively recruiting hackers who broke the law if the hackers in question were pro-government and did not want to cut off their own recruiting stream.
I think it is probably most likely that Google saw themselves being attacked, and got fairly aggressive in trying to determine who was attacking them. They almost certainly would have had to break the law to do this so are going to be a little cagey about exactly what they did. They did however probably notice that this was being organised from within certain government IP ranges and instantly went running to the US state department.
The fact is that China is not willing to even pretend to play by the rules of common netiquette. Until they change this I would much rather have an option to have all traffic to any of our servers from China dropped far upstream. I know I can do this at a firewall level but then we still can billed for bandwidth if we go over a certain level and they still have the option of DoS by overload. No, what I want is the ability to have our upstream provider drop all traffic into our IP range if it even looks like it came from China. We have no interest in doing business there so allowing traffic from an internet rogue state is just a liability for us.